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Feature: Leap Year 2012

Once every four years, on Leap Year Day, a strange portal opens to an alternate universe where many Lusipurr.com staffing choices turned out differently. Today, we celebrate Leap Year Day with a trio of guest posts written by our revered, former staff members from that strange, alternate reality. Dig in to these three exceptional editorials on topics current and relevant.

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Resident Evil

Vortex: An Afternoon of Resident Evil
Oi, chavs. Welcome to Vortex’s flat! Today, whilst in between cups of English Breakfast tea, I was going to try and play the newest Resident Evil for me Nintendo 3DS. When I got home though, I realized that needed me Nintendo dual “ashtray” stick pro. Why the bloody hell would I need to buy this ashtray. I work a hard days night for the two pound a day that merry ol’ England pays me and what to I have to spend the bloody two quid on? A bloody Nintendo ashtray that requires two double-A batteries. So instead, I went to play Street Fighter IV but, while I was sulking about the ashtray, the 3DS batteries died. So I plugged the bloody thing in and went to me loo.

Whilst I was in me loo, a chav came up in the lift and stole me mobile. I went in pursuit of the lad who stole me mobile but after I took the tube and then the lift up to the London topside I found I had lost the chav in the course of the city riots. So I went and nicked another mobil–and that promptly got nicked by me girlfriend. Sulking once again, I went to pick up me Nintendo 3DS but before I could play it I had to visit me loo again. So I went down the lift and sat me arse right down and tried to turn on the Nintendo 3DS. To my dismay the bloody thing was dead again. Methinks that a foul plot had arisen.

After four hours on the loo I took the lift and found me collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to read. Then I had to go to the loo again. As I went to the loo, I saw the chav that nicked me original mobile, and I went off in pursuit of the same mobile-nicking chav. Then, in the middle of the pursuit, I remembered that we was going to record a podcast today. So I got back home, took me laptop to the loo, and sat down to start recording the podcast. So me, Lusipurr, and that horrid Aussie bloke talked over the finer points of the Cricket whilst that gay Canadeeze and that Halo-loving Mexican were complaining that Cricket wasn’t a sport. I told them to bugger off. Cricket is the sport of gentlemen and all good-natured people of the world. If I were running this site I would make watching the Cricket a mandatory requirement of the horrible people on this staff. That Master Chef, for one, needs to take one up the arse with his talk about Halo and American Football (which is just a bunch of men in skin-tight uniforms smashing their bodies against each other). It seems quite homosexual and a good Brit like meself would never take part in such a rude and base cultural activity. Well, look at the time, chaps! It is time for fish and chips. –Then, after that, another four hours on the loo whilst trying to play Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil. Pip pip, cherrio, good day and remember to get your bumps checked.

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Master Chief

MasterChef: Final Fantasy vs. Halo
In the beginning of the 2000s a revolutionary game was made, one that is better than any other franchise that had come out before it. Right, ladies and gentlemen: Final Fantasy got Hal0wned.

While most other titles and franchises have been all right with being above average at best, Halo developer Bungie decided that they would seek to make a game that would be considered great. Halo was originally planned for the Mac operating system as an RTS game. But Microsoft wisely bought Bungie from under those miscreants’ noses, changing Halo from an RTS to an FPS. With that change, the game became something more than just a simple FPS game for the consoles: it became great.

Halo was unlike any other console shooter of its time. The majority of other shooter games allowed you to carry unrealistically large numbers of weapons. Bungie decided to change this by restricting your super-powered hero to two weapons, adding to the realism. Yet another change was that it did not turn off team-killing within the campaign. If the player accidentally shoots his team mates too much, they will turn against the player and try to kill him. Speaking of the team mates, the AI for Halo was fantastic. While occasionally the team mates would be a detriment they would sometimes actually shoot the bad guys, or even stand on the back of a Warthog.

This brings me to my original statement: Halo is greater than Final Fantasy. Throughout the years we have had many Final Fantasy games (four, I think? They use those Roman Numerals–why not use American numbers?) and none of them were good. From what I remember, the first Final Fantasy game had some blonde-haired dude with a giant sword or something. Halo has a fantastic main character. In Final Fantasy you see the face of all the characters but in Halo it keeps Master Chief’s (not me) face hidden so as to create mystery. The biggest difference that Halo has going for it is that it has multiplayer which Final Fantasy does not. Halo’s multiplayer is amazing even by the standards of 2012 and within that time Final Fantasy has made literally no multiplayer games. I think that if they did make a multiplayer game it would suck anyway.

So folks, those are the reasons why I think that Halo is better than any other game. While listening to the podcast I never understand why Lusipurr and Pierson gush over games like Final Fantasy or even that inferior game TF2. When they are not talking about having erections for Final Fantasy they are talking about their love of Cricket—and that is definitely inferior to real Football. This is why I left the site; the people who work here are idiots that do not know what is good. Good bye and good riddance.

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Dragon Age 2

TheFallenSun: The Deserving Case of Jennifer Hepler
The Male patriarchy of gaming is desperately in need of a shake-up; do not pretend that you are not part of the problem, because until you have participated in a hundred person march of uterus solidarity for International Women’s Day, then you are merely part of the machinery of male entitlement! These past several weeks have seen events so disgusting and misogynistic that for days now I have been openly weeping into my ten gallon hat. I was participating in an Occupy Houston sit-in when I heard the exciting news that Bioware’s Jennifer Hepler had opened a Twitter account, so I hurried home to see this for myself in the hope that I might be able to correspond with this great lady of gaming – but sadly events were already afoot which would see the world of gaming harrowed to its very core.

Jennifer Hepler, being a woman in gaming, is naturally a very important person in the industry, and one that possesses the inherent wisdom and virtue to identify problems in gaming that the rest of us remain ignorant to in our Male entitlement. Hepler is a fantastic role model for female gamers, and if that were not enough she has also penned one of the greatest stories of the 21st century in Dragon Age 2. So when she brings to light flaws in game design that have been long ignored by the industry’s male-limited thought processes, then we ignore her at her own peril.

Hepler is right to point out that the worst aspect of gaming for many young women is the tyranny of being made to do battle when they would prefer to be chatting or pursuing an in-game romance. Jennifer gifted the world of gaming with the peerless insight of women’s intuition when she suggested that games should allow you to skip the gameplay in order to experience the narrative in its pure form without having it interrupted by repetitive shooty bits–an observation self-evident in its truth. Gamers should have been thanking this jewel in the crown of Bioware, yet sadly a knuckle-dragging cabal of uncorrected males replete with inequitable entitlement took it upon themselves to organise an ongoing campaign of sexual terrorism directed at Hepler in response to her good idea. Sadly, this was sufficient to elicit the retreat from the Twittersphere of this cherished figure of gaming.

Not only does this sort of shamefully masculine behaviour hurt the legitimate feelings of brave women like Jennifer Hepler, but it also serves to depict the gaming industry as the unflattering stereotype of being the sole province of basement-dwelling man-babies whose only contact with women is through this shocking digital rape which occurred on Twitter. I trust we are all big enough to admit that Ms. Hepler is entirely in the right, and that her detractors are one hundred percent wrong. The last thing any of us want is for gaming visionaries like Jennifer to be pressured into refraining from making some much needed changes to game design in order to make titles more palatable to the female gamer. Perhaps mankind will one day attain the wisdom to give women like Jennifer the recognition they deserve, until then I shall remain out back grilling Halal steaks on my carbon neutral grill.